Houghton Library, Harvard University

At a loss for a new rainy day activity? Need to work on your dating skills? Try this parlor game from the 1820s…

The set, which arrived in its original box, includes forty hand-colored cards depicting men and women. The twenty cards picturing men each contain a member of a different profession and a rhyming, nineteenth-century, pick-up line. The cards featuring women contain various polite (and not-so-polite) rejections, along with a few acceptances. Presumably, players could match different cards to form various comic, romantic scenarios, thus practicing for their own courtships.

Included in the images below are examples of six different cards. (I’ve added some punctuation for clarification.)

Soldier: With sword, gorget, and sash, can you love Captain Flash?

Woman: Upon my word, you graceless Elf, I’ll keep that answer to myself.

Man: Reading improves the mind they say. Are you fond of Reading, pray?

Woman: How provoking you are thus to torment me so. But I’ll give you my answer – it is certainly No.

Man: The Bee is a pattern to all in this Life. Can you be a good & industrious Wife?

Woman: Well that’s very civil, I thank you for this. And I’ll be as civil; I answer Sir, Yes.

It’s interesting that most of the cards do indicate that the mind on some level is the guiding force to attraction. Whether now or the past future, the games of attracting a mate , wife, lover is always the same.

If you look at the cards, in a social setting, a woman can spurn a man. But as we all know, women are the masters of indirect communication. As a result, what she is really saying is that the rejection is nothing more than an approval to explore the opposite.

I’m sure in a very formal milieu such as this, that this was indeed a subtle invitation towards attarction.

I think that our modern form of this would be “Janga” or “Twister.” I suppose it is, in the end a form of “flirting.”